WINTER PARK, CO - JULY 13: Doug Briggs, of Breckenridge carries the ski gates that will be used to setup the course for the 49th running of the Epworth Cup, an unofficial ski race atop Corona Pass on Sunday, July 13, 2014 in Winter Park, CO. The summer ski race, which was originally founded in 1966 is a memorial to a Winter Park patroller that died on Mt Epworth.

WINTER PARK, CO - JULY 13: Brad Pech of Denver competes in the 49th running of the Epworth Cup, an unofficial ski race atop Corona Pass on Sunday, July 13, 2014 in Winter Park, CO. The summer ski race, which was originally founded in 1966 is a memorial to a Winter Park patroller that died on Mt. Epworth.

CORONA PASS — Ski racing was hot back in the 1960s. Maybe too hot as countless young athletes barreled through gates.

“We felt a need to have a fun ski club rather than the serious race club,” said Bob Singley, a former Winter Park ski patroller and legendary freestyle skiing pioneer who helped form the Fraser Valley’s venerable Tirebiters Ski Club, named after a character in a 1960s radio show. “Skiing is supposed to be fun, right?”

That the same rule-eschewing mantra that forged freestyle skiing decades ago as well as the more recent freeskiing movement was on display Sunday with the 49th running of the Epworth Cup, one of the nation’s longest running ski races and a tribute to grassroots, fun-first ski competitions.

It was July 1965 – but it might have been 1966 – when a gaggle of leather-booted Tirebiters tramped up the snowfield atop the 11,843-foot Mount Epworth across the valley from the Winter Park ski area. They stuck bamboo poles in the snow and held their own side-by-side slalom race, complete with beer and camping and none of the strict rules of racing.

They rallied again the next year. And every year since, creating what it is likely the longest running summer ski race in North America.

Very little has changed since that first race. Singley, who hosted some of Colorado’s first-ever freestyle skiing contests and who won three Epworth Cup races in the late 1960s based on his speedy decree that “to turn is to admit defeat,” is still involved, alongside a number of graying ski veterans. All the racers and spectators hail Singley as the reason the Epworth Cup has survived the years. His nomination to the Colorado Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame this year includes an endorsement from his friend, movie star Robert Redford.

The 72-year-old’s audacious skiing was featured in Redford’s “Downhill Racer” as well as the James Bond movie “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” in 1969. He still skis, but he doesn’t race anymore.

“I won my three races and retired,” he said, doling out T-shirts.

But Singley serves as boss of the informal Epworth Cup, carefully tallying times and handing out trophies.

On Sunday, the golden Jim Baldwin Trophy – named after a Winter Park ski patroller who died in a fall on Mount Epworth in 1976 a week before the ski race – went to Johnny May, a former ski racer.

“It was fast up there today,” said May, who first skied the Epworth Cup a decade ago.

Epworth racers and most spectators donate cash to help buy ski equipment for the Middle Park High School race team. Combined with donations from the Tirebiter’s annual St. Patrick’s Day dual-slalom race at Mary Jane, the club delivers several thousand dollars a season to local teenage ski racers.

About 25 racers — some in shorts and T-shirts — skied two laps down the snowfield on Sunday. It was fewer racers than years past.

“Seems like there is more for people to do these days,” said Singley, ranking the top 10 fastest racers on a legal tablet. (He’s got stacks of those carefully handwritten tablets dating back to the 1970s, recording names and times of every Epworth skier.)

Brad Pech counts the Epworth Cup as a step in his mission to ski once a month every year. He and his pals have logged 288 consecutive months on skis.

It hasn’t always been as glorious as it was Sunday, when pristine white snow peaked from beneath the layer of red dust that blanketed the high country in the spring. Skiers carved turns down the lapping lake.

In July 2012 – following one of the most snowless ski seasons on record – the race was held on a sliver of snow that barely held five slalom gates. Years before that they skied through feet of fresh powder. One year in the 1980s snow blocked the pass, so skiers raced below the abandoned railroad trestle halfway up Corona Pass. When Xcel closed the pass to bury a gas line in the mid 1990s, the group raced on Jones Pass.

“No matter what, it happens every year,” said Tirebiter member Chas McConnell. “There’s so much history up here. Oh, the stories.”

Details are fleeting from the heydays of the Epworth Cup. Old timers recall cars lining the four-wheel-drive Corona Pass for a mile. A few decades ago, the race would draw several hundred people. They camped for nearly a week, skiing between bouts of legendary partying.

“Oh man, those old days. I had an eight-person tent that we called the ‘Epworth Hilton,’ said a spectator wearing a 1979 Epworth hat and an Epworth T-shirt from 2000. Grinning and sipping from a 1988 Epworth tin cup, he said his name was “Fleetwood. Just Fleetwood.”

A.J. Jensen has been to the Epworth Cup since the 1970s. His two sons – including 42-year-old Emur, who won his second “firesurfer” trophy on Sunday after the previous evening’s fireside feats – first raced when they were teens. But he’s never skied in the contest.

“I come for the camping and the people. Best in the world,” said Jensen, wearing a “29th or 30th” Epworth Cup T-shirt from 1995 and a tin beer cup tied around his neck. “This is the best holiday of the year.”

Epworth memorabilia from years past is a badge of honor in the Fraser Valley. But there is no formal race organization. No beer sponsor. No website. No marketing. It’s held in July, but the exact weekend is shared only via word-of-mouth.

A first-time racer was asked more than a dozen times: “How did you hear about this?”

“We try to roll under the radar,” Singley said, noting that Mount Epworth was included in the James Peak Protection Area in the late 1990s.

While fun-loving, the group is conscientious. Every attendee gathers litter, collecting scraps of debris from the popular lakeside campsite along with their own trash.

“We leave this place cleaner than when we left,” McConnell said. “We all live here. We take care of our home.”

Jason Blevins covers tourism, mountain business, skiing and outdoor adventure sports for both the business and sports sections at The Denver Post, which he joined in 1997. He skis, pedals, paddles and occasionally boogies in the hills and is just as inspired by the lively entrepreneurial spirit that permeates Colorado's high country communities as he is by the views.

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